Snakes Can't Seem To Get Enough Of Lingaraju

Cursed or blessed?

Some may call Lingaraju S' story a series of unlucky incidents, others might think of him as blessed in some strange way. After all he is named after the Hindu deity Shiva, who is always adorned with slithering snakes on his body.

For, this 20-year-old man from Vijayapura town in Karnataka's Bengaluru Rural district has survived bites by 12 types of snakes.

According to a report in Bangalore Mirror, young Lingaraju and his family used to live in Solapur, where he would constantly be bitten by snakes, including twice by the enormously venomous King Cobras.

A particularly bad bite about five years ago left him in hospital and on medication for over six months.

During monsoon, the underground burrows of snakes are often flooded. The cold-blooded reptiles have no option but to come out into the open and head to warmer places — often, into homes. Fear and provocation leads to snakes biting humans.

On an average, a single hospital receives about 70 to 90 cases of snake bites each year in Bengaluru.